Welcome to my Metazoic site! This site discusses the existence of the creatures to come along after humans will be extinct. I first became interested in a world after man when I acquired my first copy of Dougal Dixon's After Man: A Zoology of the Future in 1992. However, I unwittingly created creatures that did not exist from the time I was about 8 years old. But it was after I obtained a copy of that book (now a collector's item) that I decided to take these same creatures I created as a child and make them more realistic in an evolutionary sense. Though it may be hard for a lot of us to grasp, humans will soon become extinct. One of the biggest factors of how this will happen is the current overpopulation rate. Which is why I don't contribute to the population. I created this world with little more than mammals fulfilling all ecological niches with the help of some friends. I even gave the era of the age after man a name, I called it the Metazoic, derived from the words for "After-era" (Meta, meaning after, and zoic meaning era). We are now in the Cenozoic era. To view all the animals I have created since I began this project, you can go to the "Meet the Mammals" section of this site. To discuss your own ideas about what you think will happen in the future world, and share your ideas with others, please feel free to leave a comment. One more thing, some of you may find this site quite offensive, and you have a right to your own opinion. But please respect my right to have an opinion too. I'm not saying there is no GOD, I believe it was HIM who got the ball rolling. But I believe after that, evolution took over. There is so much more evidence of evolution than there is of creation. Even that going on right under our noses. Other than that, enjoy yourself and visit our many links.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Alternate Humans

Usually alternate speculative biology isn't my thing. But after typing up last night's article, I thought about our aquatic lineage. I found myself doodling a bit last night and I came up with a creature as never before seen, but would have been what we'd look like today. There are some features I left out, and some I did to extremes. Most aquatic mammals are more intelligent, that could be what shaped our own intelligence. Probably how we got these big brains that science says we should never have evolved. It's true! However, I decided to keep the ape-like head features. I thought through a process of alternate evolution based on the presence of the semi-aquatic species Oreopithecus in our background. What if we had continued down that evolutionary road? Or if Oreopithecus had survived all this time, and certain individuals had continued down that road, leaving us, Homo sapiens, to inhabit the land. It could have happened. It happened in the evolution of whales. Not all individuals of the proto-species Indohyus stayed in the water. Surely some individuals evolved a land-based existence and became deer and pigs. Some deer are still semi-aquatic, and pigs like to roll around in mud, and the closely-related hippos (same lineage) are amphibius. But whales, the other descendants of Indohyus, are fully aquatic. So what if the same split happened to Oreopithecus, and both results are around today? That is what came to mind last night.

While one split of Oreopithecus was evolving on land to become us, Homo sapiens, the other split was evolving in the oceans. All fully-aquatic animals have short legs, so we lost our legs and instead grew seal-like flippers. The tail is gone, and won't come back. Our heads grew longer so we can stick our noses out of water to breathe without lifting our heads out, making us vulnerable to any land-based predators. Our hands are fully webbed. We no longer have any hair on our bodies, not even on the head or eyebrows, as they are not needed in the water. We lost sweat-glands. And the fat that accumulates in our body is put to good use. We even give birth in the water and our babies do not take their first breath until we break the sac at the surface. But the baby can still get a supply of oxygen through the umbilical cord until the mother breaks it off. We have nostrils that open and close as needed to keep water out. We have lobes on our ears that close tight to keep water out. We feed on fish and marine vegetation and can be pretty fast swimmers. Faster than any Olympic swimming champion! We are still about 5 feet long from the tip of the snout to the tip of the hind flippers.

I even thought of a name for this aquatic hominoid. I called it Thalanthropus aquaticus. Which means literally "Aquatic man of the ocean". And this is what the creature looks like:

1 comment:

The bottom one looks good, but the snout on the upper one looks a little odd.

Anyway, it would be interesting to see what we would evolve into if we ever survive and manage to save enough planet for everyone, so to speak. I mean, we are tropical primates who haven't diverged much from the basic arboreal primate structure, except for a few heat-loss related adaptations. And while genetic change would be slow, due to modern technology, it still would happen, just taking 10 MY rather than just 2.